5. The piloting of formats 1 & 2 & 4 in the TANGO-W project

A concept is only as good as its implementation: For this reason, the project duration itself has already been used to pilot the following three TANGO-W curriculum formats.

The positive finding from the TANGO-W piloting is that transformative projects can organise and imple­ment these three formats independently and that only for format (3) a joint educational institution for the consortium members' learning journey’ or a national educational institution per participating country needs to be recruited.

One effect of piloting the "webinar" format (1) was the need for the three research organisations SIN, NR and AIT to address the topic of "transformative governance" in greater depth for the first time and to exa­­mine its practical implementation at the local level of the ULLs. One effect of this was the develop­ment of a UTC process monitoring model and procedure, which was consistently applied in the f2f CoPs until the end of the project. In contrast to the internal learning effect, the webinars had a much smaller impact on the European scientific community: on average, around 25 to 40 people took part in each we­binar.

The piloting of the format (2) "Introduction into transformative governance" was carried out by the research organisations SIN / Norway and AIT / Austria during the project period: For the piloting, SIN chose the path of reflecting on the TANGO-W curriculum with a proven cooperation partner in the education sector and thereby examining a) the regional and national needs and b) real integration possibilities in existing education programmes. In contrast, AIT chose to conduct a prototype seminar with officials from the city of Klagenfurt (Climate LAB) and various research organisations (TU-Vienna, Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt, AIT) in order to a) answer existing practical questions from the muni­cipalities and b) question and further develop the usefulness of the TANGO-W Transformative Gover­nance instruments developed and c) the usefulness of the practical guidelines for municipal project managers and researchers in action.

A common finding from the piloting in Norway and Austria was that too little consideration has so far been given to the possibilities of understanding and co-creatively shaping transformation processes in the training programmes for researchers (universities) and for municipal employees (specialist training courses, universities of applied sciences). In both countries, there is a great need to expand learning programmes.

Practical learning by all project participants can only succeed through continuous, joint reflection. In order to ensure spaces for reflection and learning in the course of the project, AIT organised two 1.5-day Community of Practices (CoP) workshops per year and three online CoPs per Urban Living Lab per year. The online CoPs were used to reflect on the implemented steps and successes and to overcome any bar­riers that arose, as well as to plan the next implementation steps. In contrast, the six f2f CoP workshops were used for the introduction and experimental application of transformative architectures as well as for reflection.

From today's perspective, this combination of online and f2f CoPs has proved very successful as a com­mu­nication structure for offering and carrying out supervision for the individual ULLs and the overall project: Almost all project partners were able to use this offer their governing process of regular evaluation, re-planning, implementation and re-evaluation and thus for the systemic governing of their ULLs.

The following is a brief presentation of the lessons learnt by the municipal project managers and con­sul­ting researchers.

One feedback from all TANGO-W Urban Living Labs (ULLs) was that their municipalities felt under great pressure to change and at the same time were constantly struggling with a lack of resources. From this per­spective, research projects would be used and valued a) for the provision of financial resources to build up municipal human resources in the area of sustainability and b) for the support of municipal trans­formation projects through external expert knowledge or the planning and moderation of stake­holder processes. Researchers were criticised for sometimes being perceived as "know-it-all" if they considered their expertise to be the "real solution": In this case, there would be a great deal of pressure on officials to implement the proposed solutions as quickly as possible and without contradiction, without taking local needs and specifics into account. As a result, researchers would sometimes unintentionally trigger resis­tance and thus project delays. Municipal project managers also rejected the idea of simply retrieving data for publication purposes without adding value to the urgent or strategically important issues facing the municipality.

Feedback from the municipal project managers on their consultant researchers: The cities (Stockholm, Norrtälje, Halden, Marker, Weiz, Klagenfurt, Alytus) describe their consulting researchers as a helpful "sounding board". The regular questioning of their own implementation steps from an external perspec­tive and the contribution of ideas and impulses as to which steps/interventions the municipal project managers could experiment with further in a specific situation were experienced as useful. In addition, the increasingly practical support of the consulting researchers in the conceptualisation and moderation of stakeholder workshops and the time-consuming documentation of interim results was appreciated as the project progressed. Fundamental course changes led to major turbulence at two ULLs: In these situa­tions, the municipal project managers emphasised the appreciative and patient perseverance of the con­sulting researchers and the joint search for and reflection on possible new goals and paths as helpful. This would have brought new orientation and security to the local team and would have constituted the ac­tual quality of the "transformative governance relationship". Overall, the TANGO-W research objec­tives were not seen as "alien" and "irrelevant" and therefore not disruptive. 

Evaluation of ULL dynamics and corresponding role requirements by the research organisations: Almost every research partner was tasked with supporting two ULLs at the local level.

The Swedish research partner realised that the municipal dynamics in two cities could develop comple­tely differently, which would lead to completely different needs for support from their consulting re­search role. In order to be able to react helpfully, this first had to be recognised and understood. In retro­spect, in one case, due to the high turnover in the project manager function, it was primarily a matter of taking on the function of memory for the local ULL and continuing the local project work as often as possible in a compensatory manner. In the other case, in a large city, the aim was to be available as an external reflection partner and not to interfere unquestioningly in the daily ULL project work and muni­cipal decisions. There was much appreciation here for external feedback, which was experienced as ins­tructive.

The required design of the counselling role of the Austrian researchers consisted of giving a ULL suf­fi­cient freedom and courage to seek and develop a completely new role with comprehensive multiplication and transformation possibilities in the city after a phase of high irritation and to delegate the operational project objectives to an external third-party provider. In contrast, after the loss of the mayor and the as­so­ciated ULL mandate, the Austrian researchers were asked to support a project team conjured up by local politicians to define feasible new ULL goals and to cope well with the fundamental change of course both emotionally and conceptually (project architecture). The establishment of stable and close coope­ration between the municipal project team and the Austrian external research team proved to be critical to the success of overcoming the communicative jolts in the transition phase. Only the joint under­stan­ding, planning, evaluation and management of the new ULL goal and the completely new stakeholder group associated with it made co-creative governance of the new transformation process possible.

In contrast, the Norwegian research organisation was required to work with one of its municipal project managers to identify the needs of the target group and, as a result, negotiate a new ULL objective with the municipal clients. The other tasks consisted of step-by-step co-operation in the preparation and im­ple­mentation of workshops with the specific local target group. The practical hands-on approach of the researcher was highly praised by the municipal project management.

However, two ULLs must also be mentioned which, from today's perspective, did not succeed in the transformation process: In the case of one ULL, a research organisation was "seduced" into taking on a quasi-municipal, operational project management role: Due to the lack of networking in the municipality, this made it possible for the municipality to keep the researchers away from all strategic, municipal in­formation and decision-making processes and to continue their usual top-down decisions unques­tioned and undisturbed. In this ULL, the organisation of a stakeholder workshop was the only novelty at local level. In the second case, the internal, municipal project manager was "promoted" to the manage­ment of an external agency and lost access to all municipal relationships, important municipal resources and muni­­cipal access to stakeholders. By shaping his own role as a municipal project manager in terms of key figure-driven controlling, this municipal project manager was unable to take advantage of the ser­vices offered by the local consulting researcher or the supervising, external AIT research organisation.

The case vignettes described above show that counselling researchers need to have a high level of obser­vation skills, flexibility, adaptability and a broad repertoire of methods in order to be able to respond help­fully to different and sometimes rapidly changing local needs.

This experience led the TANGO-W team to develop practical guidelines for municipal, transformative project managers and consultant researchers (see Chapter 4) instead of detailed descriptions of functions and tasks. Analogous to supervision from an external perspective, these offer food for thought for asking unfamiliar questions during the planning, implementation and evaluation of transformation projects without losing sight of the system as a whole.